Synopsis: A damaged flight ends up circling without anywhere to land en route from Spain to Mexico.

Pedro Almodovar’s latest is a comedy about a plane with mechanical difficulties that force it to land somewhere short of its destination. That also defines its place in the Almodovarian pantheon. I’m So Excited is a throwback to the director’s earlier, goofier films, but it doesn’t work nearly as well as it should.

Most of the film takes places aboard a passenger jet, the Chavela Blanca, named for two of the director’s recently deceased friends. There’s also a short prelude starring Antonio Banderas and Penelope Cruz, but it’s the last time we’ll see them in the movie, more’s the pity.

The three male flight attendants – Ulloa, Fajas and Joserra – are unabashedly, mincingly homosexual, something the film only gets away with (barely) because of Almodovar’s own orientation. Imagine if The Lone Ranger had been directed by Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond. Or Pacific Rim by giant robots!

An hour into a flight from Spain to Mexico, the crew learns that their landing gear has been damaged – Banderas and Cruz might be to blame – and that they will have to fly in circles until a suitable runway can be found on which they can crash land. The stewards decide to make the passengers’ lives (and their own) more bearable by handing out copious amounts of alcohol and mild hallucinogens. Even the pilots get some.

The director cleverly abbreviates his cast of characters by having everyone lower than First Class drugged into a stupor. (One of the flight attendants tosses off an explanation that this is to combat “Economy Class Syndrome,” which is an actual term used to describe blood clots that can develop on long voyages.)

The remaining passengers are a bag of mixed nuts. Lola Duenas plays a psychic who keeps mentioning that she can smell death in the plane. Cecelia Roth is trying to circulate a petition demanding that they be compensated for a broken in-flight entertainment system. There’s a shady financier (José Luis Torrijo) with an estranged daughter, and a semi-famous actor named Ricardo (Guillermo Toledo), who decides that he’d better call a couple of his girlfriends on the ground in case they don’t make it.

The flakes-on-a-plane plot is full of potential, and there are oodles of examples in which just such a setup has been mined for comedy (Airplane!), drama (Flightplan), horror (Red Eye) and action (Con Air).

This one is clearly looking for laughs, but despite the business-class setting, it does so on the cheap. Pilots are horndogs! Passengers are shrill and unruly! Gay flight attendants – and is there any other kind? – are catty and prone to breaking into show tunes. (To amuse the passengers, they lip-synch to the title song by the Pointer Sisters, although the original Spanish title of the film translates as The Lover Passengers.)

The film is excellently shot by Almodovar regular José Luis Alcaine. As usual I was left wondering if the filmmakers didn’t have access to hitherto undiscovered shades of yellow and red, so eye-poppingly bright is the colour palette.

Ironically, the story only really takes flight when the action shifts to the ground, in an extended sequence that finds Ricardo interrupting his girlfriend’s suicide attempt by calling her to say goodbye. Flustered, she drops her phone off a bridge – only to have it picked up by another ex-mistress. But all too soon, we’re back on the plane, feeling that Economy Class Syndrome creeping in.

I’m So Excited opens July 5 in Toronto and Vancouver, and July 19 in Montreal, with other cities to follow.